Thursday, November 19, 2015

AUMF's Can be Magical

At first, one might look at Senator Lindsey Graham's call for an authorization for military force against Daesh as just being an invitation to an open-ended total war with no exit strategy, and every grinding, bloody, anti-civilian tactic on offer.

But that phrase: "not limited by Time, Geography or Means".

Sounds sinister: We will fight them on the oceans and seas, on land, and on the astral plane? We will fight them in R'lyeh and Carcosa. We will go back in a time machine and mess with their grandpappies. Dark forces will be invoked. Zombies may be deployed.

4 comments:

I think it needs a constitutional amendment. "The ability of the Congress to declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water, shall have no limits in space or time."

Vixen, just for your information the war is already raging on the astral plane and has been for a very long time. It's helpful to know that in Western esotericism the astral light is understood to extend throughout all the different bardos. The particular reference to the astral plane is a construction by Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. They both have their application. You must realize that nothing whatsoever can happen in Malkuth that is not preceded and succeeded by happenings in Yesod and beyond.

It helps to realize that the cosmology from which the astral light and plane are conceived is a philosophy that includes immanence. That is to say the esoteric cognition both East and West believe in a transcendental, absolute reality and also an immanent reality. In this sense it borrows a little from both Plato and Aristotle.

Using the nomenclature of the Qaballah for illustration even though it could be repeated in the nomenclature of a variety of cosmologies, you start off with an Unknowable absolute reality that has no particulars or qualifications. Qaballistically we are talking about Ain and Ain Soph. Finally Ain Soph Aur emanates Kether and then Ether emanates Chokmah, which emanates Binah, and so forth all the way down the sephiroth of the Tree or the different bardos. As this process moves from the timeless into time, or the transcendental into immanence, the astral plane then has a presence prior to the manifestation of matter. And so while effects can be made to occur from Malkuth imprinting thought forms in the astral plane, the natural direction of time is for the astral plane to develop circumstances before they materialize on earth.

A lot of invention, symphonies, and other creations are received from various agents in the astral light as they are developed in those regions before they are received by earthly inventors in their respective fields.

Since the transcendental is imminent, that means the absolute reality is also immanent in you and me, and as a consequence through mediation and other practices we can get in touch with the absolute nature as it is immanent in us it gives us a touchstone with which to have a contact with the transcendental absolute nature.

There is a spiritual component as I (didactic/agnostic/pagan-leaning) grasp it--my first instinct after the events of 9/11 was meditation and manifesting bodhicita. The atmosphere was such that it felt like a personal struggle to want to mediate for less-terrible outcomes and hope that better heads prevailed before a cycle of violence too terrible to speak of happened. Like I wanted the world to Wake the Hell Up. As a skeptic, I don't know if that kind of working did more than make me feel better. In events of upheaval, tempering the inbuilt lower urge for vengeance with understanding and a sense of justice help wisdom to emerge. Crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of war has both an inner and outer negative effect--inwardly, one's breaks with the natural balance to an obsession with action is blinding; outwardly, without the emergence of wisdom, mistakes and failures continue. All beings have the potential to realize that the bullshit can stop--but we aren't all catching up with stopping the bullshit on the same cycle.

All I know for sure is, the Daesh/ISIS people are chock full of bullshit. The level on which to deal with them is the one where less bullshit gets on oneself.